Reign in Blood has some great tracks – and not just the two everyone remembers, either.

“Epidemic,” for example, has an addictive syncopated gallop riff that’s worth tuning down to Eb so you can play along. “Postmortem” is punchy and powerful, and perfectly leads into “Raining Blood” (the two will be forever linked in the fans’ minds, due to a mastering error that put the first verse of “Raining Blood” at the end of “Postmortem”).

But much of it is an unfocused riff salad, full of tracks that don’t come off as songs but 2-3 minute explosions of energy. “Epidemic” is riff, verse, riff, verse, verse, break, riff, verse, fin! “Criminally Insane” is another half a song that speeds up and slows down in a spontaneous, unplanned way – there’s not really a musical thru-line of tension and release. It’s like it was written by a Turing-incompatible computer.

“Necrophobic” is super fast, but sounds more like four guys trying to set a land speed record than music.

The album’s greatest moment is “Angel of Death”, which has great riffs, a crushing middle break, and lyrics about Nazis. I refuse to believe this was not a marketing strategy. When you’re a female pop duo (think tATu or The Veronicas), you’ve got to have people thinking you’re lipstick lesbians. When you’re a metal band, you’ve got to have people thinking you’re Nazis or Satanists. It worked for KISS and Black Sabbath, so why not Slayer?

The album’s so heavy, fast, and evil that it’s almost overpowering…but I wish it was more consistent. Great riffs share flat space with dull “speed-pick one note until you die of boredom” time fillers. Heavy metal classics rub shoulders with tracks that don’t even sound finished. It’s very uneven moment to moment and minute to minute. Even the vaunted lyrics frequently dissolve turn into shouted tirades about Satan and slashings.

I like Dave Lombardo’s drumming. This is basically the benchmark for metal drumming in 1986. Nobody else was playing this fast or this technically – except perhaps for Dark Angel’s Gene Hoglan. The production is also quite good – sharp and clinical, with clear and crisp allocation of sonic space between the kicks, the rhythm guitars, the what-have-you. The whole affair clocks in at under 30 minutes – say what you will about it, but it does not overstay its welcome.

Recent years have been unkind to the dinosaurs, and unkind to this movie. I think the Cretaceous extinction event is still shooting a few final hoops against them as the clock runs down in 2015. We now know that dinosaurs had feathers. And we know that an apatosaurus, a tricerotops, and a pterodactyl in the same scene makes as much sense as a historical movie in which Cleopatra consults George Washington on the construction of the Great Wall of China. But this movie is still powerful.

And big. That’s mostly what I remembered – creatures inhabiting a landscape that makes everything seem small. That’s what separates it from Disney’s the Lion King – in this movie, nobody’s the king, and even mighty apex predators often end up behind the eightball. The dinosaurs aren’t masters of their domain, they’re struggling to survive in a changing world. The questing youngsters find a kind of sanctuary at the end, but after their travails it seems a bit mocking – like giving a child a lollipop after open heart surgery. That’s the other thing I remember, the gloom.

Otherwise The Land Before Time can be compared to The Lion King quite a bit – some parts line up shot for shot. Tiny creatures scurrying around gigantic paws. A warped, twisted landscape with a palette to match, full of ochre reds and cinerous grays. The death of a parent as a plot device, and divine intervention from that parent’s spirit to close an open plot parenthesis.

The Land Before Time bears the scars of the moviemaking process – certain scenes seem curiously truncated and brief, as if vital footage was slashed out of the movie with an axe. The whole enterprise seems strangely short – barely longer than an hour. Movies about dinosaurs usually slow down and bask in the experience. This one just has young and vulnerable dinosaurs running from danger to danger, which might stress younger viewers.

It’s probably the second best Don Bluth film, behind Secret of NIMH (whose laurels partly belong to another, as it was adapted from a book). Bluth’s animation studio never succeeded taking much market share from Disney, but they probably opened up animation to a few new people. Disney’s movies from this period are hard to watch as an adult – Bluth’s are not. There’s a nice depth to them: not depth in that they’re saying something profound (every Don Bluth movie can be essentially reduced to a “follow your heart” or “believe in yourself” message), but in that there’s a lot of cinematic space explored: subtle interplays of textures and sounds, and occasional unconventional artistic choices.

On the downside, all the dinosaurs have cutesy names for themselves (long-necks, sharp-teeth, etc), sparing us the indignity of antediluvian creatures uttering Latin phylogenetic classifications at the expense of causing my sister to think that those were the actual names for the dinosaurs.

It’s time for Helloween to start providing reasons why they should continue to exist. We’re now three albums past their supposed comeback effort Gambling with the Devil, and now they’re barely getting dressed for work. Not only have you already heard this entire album many times before, including bonus tracks, but their occasionally experimental touches actually repulse you back towards their more familiar songs. Yeah, this is the kind of album where you hang on to the fillers for comfort.

“Heroes” sets a generic tone for a generic album…bouncy main riff, 16th note double bass, snare on the 2 and the 4, shouty gang chorus with lots of multiband compression…it’s not offensive, but I’ve heard it SO many times before (contrast with “Saber and Torch” by Edguy, “Army of the Night” by Powerwolf, “Far Away” by Battle Beast…and those are songs released in the past year alone) that its impossible to muster much excitement.

“Battle’s Won” and the title track are tolerable and fast. Maybe tolerable because they’re fast – an acceptable baseline for a Helloween song these days is “doesn’t overstay its welcome.” Then the album really starts to come apart. Track after track of Deris-penned composed filler tracks, all of them bouncing along at a fairly fast clip and all of them feeling utterly interchangeable. In “Lost in America” they just repeat the chorus of “Who is Mr Madman” with different words. Fuck off, guys. If I wanted a glorified cover band I’d listen to Unisonic.

As often happens these days, Weikath saves the album a bit. I liked the Boston-sounding “Creatures in Heaven”, and the savage and energetic “Claws” – which retells “Eagle Fly Free” from a less idealistic and more primal standpoint. Romanticise eagles if you want, but never forget the claws. “You, Still of War” is cute. Don’t know if you’d put her in a major movie, but you’d fuck her on the casting couch.

Basically, we’re spoiled for choice in 2015, and we can and should expect better than makeweight efforts from nostalgic past giants. In a world where Black Majesty, Battle Beast, and Rhapsody represent the state of the art, Helloween seems dated and old – a jalopy on a scalper’s lot with a new coat of paint. Two or three genuinely interesting songs, and for the rest I’m struggling to stay awake. It’s not “My God Given WRONG hurr hurr”, but we’re getting there.